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Beer Beef Bone Broth in a Cast Iron Dutch Oven

Beer Beef Bone Broth a rich and nutritious broth made from what most call soup bones and butcher scraps. And it makes the most amazing soup, chili, and stew base you've ever wanted to taste.
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Prep Time 30 minutes
Cook Time 1 day 1 hour
Ingredients Equipment Method Notes

Ingredients
  

  • 2-5 Pounds Butcher Bones or Soup Bones. This depends on what will fit in your pot (5, 7, or 9-Quart Dutch Oven).Many, smaller cut bones will fit in a pot whereas larger, longer soup bones(those dog bones types of bones) may be less.
  • 6 Cans/Bottles Six Beers From om dark ale to lighter lagers. Stick with a lower IBU (International Bitters Units). You may need to use less than 6 beers or may need to add more (or a bit of water), depending on the size of your Dutch oven. And, that’s pretty much it. We add no salt, vinegar, vegetables, or anything.

Equipment

  • 1 Cast Iron Baking Pan Any cast iron pot or pan large enough to hold the number of bones you were able to purchase / obtain.
  • 1 Cast Iron Dutch Oven Large enough to accommodate your volume of bones.
  • 1 Wooden spatula or spoon To rotate / turn / stir the simmering bones.
  • 1 Tongs To remove the larger, hot bones from the broth mixture.
  • 2 Large Bowls Large enough to hold the ingredients and to handle the hot liquid.
  • 1 Metal colander. “Metal” because we’ll be running some hot liquids through this. “Metal” because we’ll be running some hot liquids through this.
  • 3 Canning Jars Three Quart-Sized canning jars with lids
  • 1 Canning Funnel Optional yet recommended
  • 1 Bowl That will accommodate your colander to press the broth out of the meat-ish stuff.
  • 1 Large ladle or large spoon. to ladle the fat off the top of the broth mixture.

Method
 

Prep And Pre Roasting for Color and Flavor
  1. Get as many butcher and soup bones as will fit into the cast iron pot you have available.
  2. Roast the bones for about 1 hour at 350°F / 175°C.
Creating The Pure Beer Beef Bone Broth
  1. Pull the bones out and put them in the pot you will let them simmer in.
  2. Use a low-IBU beer and preferably a dark ale or non-sweet porter (a nice lager will work well too).
  3. Pour in enough beer(s) to almost top-off the pot of roasted bones.
  4. Turn the heat to medium until you’ve reached a rolling boil.
  5. Rotate things a bit (stir it all up) and turn the heat down to low for the long-haul.
  6. Rotate the bones / Stir up the bones and meat-ish stuff every few hours as they simmer (meat-ish is the fat, marrow, ligaments, and actual meat remnants).
  7. After about 24-hours, let the pot rest for a few minutes to allow the fat (clear-ish liquid) to float to the top of the broth mixture.
  8. Skim off as much of the fat as you can and keep for future sautéing and searing. There will be some fat remaining and that’s A-OK; we want that fat to remain.
  9. Remove as many bones as you can find from the mixture.
  10. Using a strainer, strain out the broth mixture to a bowl in order to separate the meat-ish stuff from the pure broth.
  11. Once the liquid starts to rise to the bottom of the colander / strainer, fill the first jar with the pure broth.
  12. If you have a manageable amount of weight (pot and broth mixture remaining), pour the mixture over the colander / strainer, and catch the pure broth in the bowl.
  13. Pour the pure broth into hot-liquid-tolerant jars for storage. More of the fat will rise to the top and create that “fat-cap.”
  14. Press out the remaining meat-ish stuff to get as much of the pure bone broth out as you can. Add this to your pure broth jars.
  15. You are Essentially Done here, and the following steps are optional. I like to “Wash” the meat-ish stuff with a couple of beers to get more of the broth and flavor out of the mixture. Take a bowl large enough to hold about 2 beers and the remaining meat-ish stuff.
Broth Wash (Optional)
  1. Pour two beers into the bowl then dump the meat-ish stuff in the bowl and “wash” the material to “capture” all that remining broth and flavor.
  2. Strain the meat-ish stuff and beer mixture into a bowl and pour the liquid into a separate jar for storage (don’t mix the two broth-types together). This broth-wash will jell-up like the pure broth yet not as firm. And still, it’ll be much more flavorful than any stock-in-a-box.
Finished!
  1. We’re done! Now, you have all that meat-ish stuff left. What do you do with it? We make dog biscuits. Remove all the small bones from the meat-ish stuff. We’ll be using a food processor later (but that is another recipe).

Notes

This is not a final meal recipe; it’s a recipe for creating a major, flavorful ingredient for your soups, stews, chilis, gumbos, risottos, and the like. A recipe is only as good as the ingredients we add. Stock-in-a-box is not the way to add that level of flavor you expect from your recipes. Great if in a pinch, but not a way to create a memorable meal that they’ll be asking later, “when are you going to make that again?”
The steps are seemingly many. But, once you create this recipe once, you’ll be able to do it without having to print this recipe out again.